Treating drivers like adults

Spiegel Online recently published an article called

CONTROLLED CHAOS:European Cities Do Away with Traffic Signs

From the article:

European traffic planners are dreaming of streets free of rules and directives. They want drivers and pedestrians to interact in a free and humane way, as brethren -- by means of friendly gestures, nods of the head and eye contact, without the harassment of prohibitions, restrictions and warning signs.

Now when I first started to read the article, my first thought was of the death and carnage that would result as cars ploughed headlong through crowds of pedestrians, unchecked by any barriers or warning signs.

How could this work? Drivers and pedestrians need to be told where they can and cannot go. They need to be told what is and is not dangerous. How would people know when to stop, when to give way, and when it was safe to proceed?

But do they? In my experience, most drivers by definition are adults. But what happens when you treat adults like children, by regulating every little thing they do?

Once again, from the article:

Psychologists have long revealed the senselessness of such exaggerated regulation. About 70 percent of traffic signs are ignored by drivers. What's more, the glut of prohibitions is tantamount to treating the driver like a child and it also foments resentment. He may stop in front of the crosswalk, but that only makes him feel justified in preventing pedestrians from crossing the street on every other occasion. Every traffic light baits him with the promise of making it over the crossing while the light is still yellow.

So the more we try to legislate for common sense, the more we drive it away. It's something we see with children, with employees and indeed with drivers. If you treat them like children and don't give them any responsibility, they will act like irresponsible children.

"The many rules strip us of the most important thing: the ability to be considerate. We're losing our capacity for socially responsible behavior," says Dutch traffic guru Hans Monderman, one of the project's co-founders. "The greater the number of prescriptions, the more people's sense of personal responsibility dwindles."

By introducing more and more rules, we're encouraging people to think less. We training them to simply obey the coloured light, the arrow or the number on the sign, rather than being aware of their environment and thinking of the consequences of their actions.

I only see two barriers to introducing this in Australia. One is minor and one is major.
a) the current culture of treating drivers like morons has created a generation of morons. Over time this will slowly change, and since the majority of drivers are sensible adults, this should not present a huge problem.
b) Removing all these controls also removes the various fines for disobeying them, and hence a huge revenue stream for the government. This presents a major problem, and thus I predict that it won't happen, but the reasons given will be because of "safety concerns".